Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Dedicated Christian believers will readily acknowledge that many human religions arise from natural, not supernatural sources. That is, while the Christian may think that his religion was founded on real, supernatural events, or the actions of a genuine supernatural being (God),he will accept that many of the world’s other religions like Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, Zoroastrianism, and so, had natural origins. Those religions came about through human enthusiasm, hallucinations, historical contingencies, mistakes, mythologies, psychiatric disorders, social movements, faulty and revised memories, evangelism, or other naturally occurring phenomena. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call these natural religions and contrast them to a bona fide supernatural religion that really does originate through the intentions, actions, miracles, or interventions of a divine being that has power and knowledge that transcends the merely natural world. And if the followers of a natural religion hold the view that their doctrines are from a supernatural source, they are mistaken. That is to say that they follow a false religion. Many Christians will be quite comfortable with calling these false religions. Other people who are more sensitive to issues of religious tolerance will be uncomfortable calling them false. But if we are being clear, everyone will have to acknowledge that some religions entail, require, or recommend that we accept many claims as true that are, strictly speaking, false.

How many false, natural religions are there in the world? Even if he is a dedicated adherent to one he believes is of supernatural origin, a reasonable believer will have to acknowledge that there have been thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of them. For most believers in a particular religious tradition, the vast majority of other religious traditions have natural origins and are therefore false. Even if there is a God, it is obvious that human history spawns great numbers of false, natural religions. Countless religious ideas spring from human social and mental life, then some catch on and become the start of a whole religious movement. Thus far, even the deeply committed Christian should concur with all of my premises. But now I’d like to explain what I take to be a devastating problem for the Christian in reconciling the view that his or her personal religious views are authentic while so many others are false. The question that should be deeply troubling to the Christian from the inside is this: why would the one true God who sought to establish the only real religion bury, confound, obscure, or hide it in the midst of so many other false, natural religions?

Here’s what I mean: Christianity has relatively inauspicious origins. What we have today is a very small number of copies of writings that were written decades and even centuries after Jesus is alleged to have preached, been executed, and the returned from the dead. Two hundred years or so after the alleged events, the modern Bible was sifted from thousands of early writings that gave very different accounts of Jesus and Christian principles. A very long and complicated process with unreliable nodes of transmission provides us with claims of highly dubious origins. Numerous doubts accumulate at the beginning with the alleged eye witnesses, then the stories are repeated an unknown number of times by an unknown number of people before they are written down by a small group of unknown authors. They these stories are copied and finally the Bible we know is culled from thousands of other written works. At each stage of transmission, we should have several worries about the fidelity of the process that accumulate and amplify by the time the Christian stories get to us. I’ve discussed these layers of doubts and their cumulative, amplifying effect in many early posts.

The people engaged in the creation and transmission of these early ideas would have been subject to all of the same natural phenomena that affected the foundations of all of the false religions in the world: psychosis, bereavement hallucinations, the Asch effect, source amnesia, superstition, false supernaturalism, Iron Age ignorance, paranormalism, confirmation bias, fabrication, hedging, revised memories, poor eyewitness abilities, propaganda, spin, mythological influences, heightened paranormal expectations, suggestibility, the lack of the scientific method, gullibility, and so on. At the very least, the Christian must acknowledge that these phenomena are real, and that they very frequently are responsible for spawning other religious movements. Even if Christianity is truly of a supernatural origin, and none of these doubt amplifying factors affected its formation, they would have been close at hand, and their presence obscures and undermines our ready acceptance of it. We know that these phenomena affect people and that they spawn religious movements. And we have very little reliable information about the origins of Christianity that might convince us that they were not a factor.

So the question for the Christian is, why did your God make your religion indistinguishable from all the natural religions in so many of these ways? The puzzle is made worse by the facts that, by your own reckoning, your God has the power, the knowledge, the intention, and the will to make himself and real supernatural origins of the Christian religion evident to all humans. In fact, by your own reckoning, he is going to hold every human in history morally and epistemically culpable if they do not acknowledge the real supernatural origin of Christianity by condemning them to an eternity of unimaginable torture. Yet despite having the ability, knowledge, and desire to transcend above all of the false, natural religions, he does not.

The embedding of the one, true religion—Christianity—within human history in a fashion that makes it look like so many false religions should create deeply troubling cognitive dissonance for the believing Christian. The simple and inescapable answer is that Christianity isn’t the one, true supernatural religion. Your religion is a natural religion, just like all of the others. And now you’ve been right to brink of accepting the conclusion. You already acknowledge that the vast majority of religions in history arose by misguided, natural avenues. And you can see that the origins of Christianity resembles those false religions in many salient ways. You have to acknowledge that we have very little, reliable information about the origins of Christianity. And you can see that God, if he were real, and if he had the power and character that you have imputed him, would have done it differently. He could have and would have done it better. All that remains is for you is to abandon the wild gyrations and rationalizations that are typically attempted to escape this dilemma to explain God’s hiddenness. The simple and obvious solution is that Christianity is a natural religion.

Yup, that doesn't improve their position at all, for the reasons you cite and more. Furthermore, this response creates a new paradox--on this view God utterly obscured his existence by disguising the one real supernatural religion as a natural one, then he bestows special private encounters to an inexplicable few people in the midst of billions of other people who have their own false mystical experiences. One paradox gets replaced with another. Either God's a hopeless bumbler, or (easier) we just made it all up. Thanks Robert.

Professor, could you please consider adding a sharing button on the bottom of your posts. This can be set up automatically - there are a variety of services available including www.addthis.com. Thank-you for maintaining this inforative site.

Soku, this argument is directed specifically at those Christians who would not accept that the majority of other religions have real supernatural origins. I have had many other previous posts dealing with the sort of broader theism you're talking about.

Sean, that's not a very good summary, although I can see why you might think so. A better summary: Why did the Christian God make the origination of his religion look just like all of the other misguided and mistaken religions in the world? He didn't--Christianity is false too.

Isn't what Robert's post refers to basically what Plantinga's extended A/C model operates around (the regenerating power of the HS overcoming the noetic effects of sin on the truth-tracking cognitive faculties designed by God to generate true beliefs in the right environment for them etc etc)?

Obviously Plantinga's point is that if God exists then this model/something like it should be true.

Two things I've wondered about it that would presumably show it doesn't exist would be that while people and groups begin to believe in various dissimilar god(s) in an independent manner, they don;t do the same for the specific ones in specific religions. Belief in Jesus/Yahweh hasn't and doesn't pop(ped) up at random, which should be expected were this model true - i.e. there weren't people in Mexico or Australia starting to believe in Jesus independently of and prior to missionaries arriving on their shores etc.

Secondly, if this regenerating spirit is saving true believers from having or generating false beliefs (or at least reducing them - and I'm assuming this includes beliefs that have nothing to do with God, just true/false beliefs in general) that believers would be expected to consistently outperform non-Christians (and in particular atheists) in academic testing, tasks involving reasoning/other uses of cognitive faculties etc. The fact that this doesn't seem to be the case would suggest the HS (or at least Plantinga's extended model) doesn't exist in reality.

To me these objections seem rather obvious (and would seem to rather easily disprove that Plantinga's model actually exists), but it presumably can't be as simple as that to show he's wrong can it?

Nice points Funkenstein. I think there is a consensus, even among reformed epistemology advocates, that there are several problems in Plantinga's arguments. Yours sound like plausible ones. Although P is tenacious and hasn't relented, despite some hard objections. The big problem that many agree on now is that Plantinga's convenient way of insulating his own view from attack is available to anyone else to do the same. A Great Pumpkin believer can insist that the Great Pumpkin insures that his cognitive faculties are functioning properly and producing special metaphysical knowledge of his ultimate pumpkin-ness. And this believer can employ all the same tropes to isolate Great Pumpkinism from objections. A great deal has been written on this.

Hmmm, well Soku and Mike Speir bring up a possibility that I hadn't thought of: A Christian might think (unreasonably) that all of the thousands of other religions are actually supernatural, but they fit within the Christian metaphysics by being of evil, demonic, or satanic origin. So maybe they are all put here to obscure, distract, and undermine our faith.

This doesn't really change the argument. It just pushes the paradox back a level. First, why would an all powerful and all knowing, good God tolerate his one true religion's being so interfered with? He's got the power, the knowledge, and the goodness to prevent Satan or demons from wrecking his plan, right? Second, why would God set up or create his one true religion so that it looks just like all of the evil, demonic, and satanic ones? Third, Satan? Seriously? Demons? Seriously? Stop acting like a child and get your head out of your ass. There are no such things. We don't have a single reliable, confirmable sound piece of evidence that suggests that anything like this is real. Atheists, skeptics, and non believers need to stop wasting their time taking nonsense like this seriously. Clearly, if someone thinks that the world is full of mysterious, invisible, evil demonic agents, the burden of proof is on them to show us. Until then, I don't see that I should even dignify these ideas with a response.

Well, you're right that they don't have any believable evidence for, say, demons that we're obliged to accept. And if they're trying to push their religion on us, all we have to say in rebuttal is, "Prove it!"

On the other hand, because they do believe in demons, the kind of argument you've made in this post won't faze them. It depends on who's attacking and who's defending, on who's trying to convince whom.

Fair enough, Mike. In the end I can never prevent anyone from being flagrantly irrational. I can show them, over and over, how the views they claim to have are utterly contradictory and unintelligible. If that doesn't bother them, they've just left the domain of grown up discussion. But, contrary to your claim that they will be unfazed by my post, I explained in the last comment and in the post why retreating to the demonic religions position doesn't help the problem at all. Same for people who try to "solve" the problem of evil by blaming it on the devil. That doesn't explain why God tolerates its existence in the world, it just adds another level of questions. Thanks again.

The same analysis is actually quite useful when discussing cosmic and biological evolution. When one assumes God's omnipotence, one has to wonder why God did not simply create the entire Universe, life and everything after all at once. And if God DID create the entire Universe all at once, why did He obscure His presence by making it appear that the Universe evolved, that life evolved, that geological and chemical and physical forces are responsible for the phenomena we encounter on a daily basis.

It is a rather convoluted process for an omnipotent being to engage in and serves no real purpose other than to confuse and obfuscate those who are supposed to believe in Him.

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Atheism

Author:

Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

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Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.